EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 TRAUMA

This week I realized that being called a “fenderhead” by a Master Chief Bosun’s Mate won’t qualify me for a handicapped parking sticker. I’ll learn to live with it.

What it does qualify me for is pot, weed, Mary Jane, herb, grass, … you know, marijuana. Isn’t that something?

It works this way. They have this modern miracle called “medical marijuana.” If a doc prescribes it, you can get it, and plenty of it. Legal? What you talking about? Just check out the traffic jam down at the dispensary.

Then they have this thing called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is a serious disorder and deserves serious consideration. It appears frequently in veterans. In the Civil War, it was called “soldier’s heart.” In WWI, “shell shock.” In WW II, “battle fatigue.” All those terms signify participation in combat. Now they just call it “PTSD.”

As I say, it deserves recognition and those suffering from it deserve solace, succor, and treatment. Ultra-woke and don’t feel safe with my talking about it? Bite me.

Here’s the catch. It’s a self-diagnosed ailment. It applies equally to the grunts who survived the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley and the airmen who spent their enlistment an Homestead Air Force Base in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

Wonder what ailment qualifies you for the legal enhancement?

All I would have to do is say I have it. “Gee Doc, I wake up in a sweat with “Fenderhead” pounding in my brain.”

Bingo. The only problem is that I think smoking pot is the silliest thing since disco music.

I could get it but don’t think I should sell it. I could barter it for things like lawn mowing, but I’ve seen the result of work done by kids that probably had a toke or two.

Maybe I should just continue to overcome my anxieties by keeping up with the daily news.

Uh, don’t think so. I might really get it.

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 PATRIOTISM

The Vietnam War generation doesn’t receive the approval that the WWII Generation did. No wonder. One lost. The other won. The Korean War generation doesn’t receive much attention at all. No one can figure out exactly what the result was. No one even knows what the current generation is doing. There aren't enough of them to matter.

The Vietnam vets have a special place in my heart though, for one obvious reason. Beyond that, there is a special place in glory for those who were faced with a situation where the justification for the war was fabricated and false, the sentiment for it was mixed, opposition to it was violent, and the rich kids seemed to avoid it if they wished. What is special about a group of young men on the verge of their adult life facing the forced encounter with such a war?

Answer: They went anyway.

Yes they went. Some because they had to. Some because they wanted to. Some, myself included, because they wouldn’t risk telling their mothers they were cowards. One supporting layer floated them all. Deep down inside, they felt America was worth sacrificing two or more years of their life for, and maybe even itself.

America was that important. They were willing to sacrifice it all for her.

Now we have politicians that don’t seem to feel that way. Either their cult, their greed, their egos, or their simple mendacity govern their actions. If they loved America as much as we did, they would step aside and let young people with fresh and wholesome ideas run for office.

On some days, reading the news, I’m not sure that our present people deserve the America for which young men once risked it all.

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 TREASON

When I was a teenager, someone told me that if you did anything portraying the United States flag upside down it was an act of treason, the FBI would come after you, and you would be sent to prison. I believed it to the point of once trying to steam off a stamp that had a picture of the flag on it that I had mistakenly pasted the wrong way. Didn’t work, and that was when the cost of a stamp was important to me.

Now I know it’s okay. A Justice of the United State Supreme Court has indicated so. I still don’t do it though. It’s that oath I took, and all.

Some are saying that justice should recuse himself from certain cases since he believes in displaying treasonous beliefs in public. He won’t. The Chief Justice, John Roberts won’t make him, saying, “The practice we have followed for 235 years [is that] individual justices decide recusal issues.” This “we’ve-always-done-it-that-way” seems more fitting for poor workmanship or an excuse justifying school segregation than behavior in the highest court in the country.

That’s the court, by the way, that didn’t buy said argument in the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954.

Things change I suppose. Next time I accidently paste a stamp on upside down I won’t end up throwing the envelope away and I’ll thank Justice Samuel Alito for saving me 66 cents. Now I’ll run to the PO and buy some more stamps. I’ll ignore local laws and if a police officer stops me for speeding through the city streets my defense will be, “I’ve always done it that way.”

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 WORDS

A couple of things I’ve seen recently bother me. One happened yesterday when I clicked a YouTube video featuring a replay of a local TV news show reporting a rape. All was fine except that the word “rape” was blocked. Same-same the “F” word or the other six forbidden utterances. Something is wrong here and I struggle to imagine just what it is.

I’m not a fan of gory, but I do revere history. The old films of war and holocaust now suffer from having explicit scenes and photos of dead bodies blurred. Disclosures appear before ads and videos warning that the following may make someone uncomfortable.

Have we gotten too “woke?”

I fear it may be so. Will the word “Nazi” be blurred in future telecasts because millennials don’t “feel safe” when they hear it? How about "Manson, Bundy, Dahmer, and Gingrich?"

I tell you what makes me feel “not safe.” It’s the wimping and bastardization of human intercourse and the blurring of reality in the name of succor. I've been so "not feeling safe" in my life that I would have emptied a clip on my Sainted Mother had she come screaming out of the jungle at me. I think it served to make the rest of my life more joyous. Reality teaches and strengthens. An impenetrable wall to block fear is nothing more than a woke Plato's Cave. 

The unfortunate result of all this? I’m drifting farther from the left and toward the center. I’ll never reach the cruelty, selfishness, and irrationality of the right, but the extreme left may lose a tacit supporter. And just ask those who participated in the American revolution, women’s suffrage, or the civil rights struggle how important tacit support is.

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 PASSWORDS

Although the claims abound, I’m not sure that it is the economy, specifically inflation, that has America teetering on the edge of anarchy. A simple anecdotal observation is that, on my trips to our local Walmart, the baskets I see driven by folks with MAGA hats or Confederate flag decals are filled with Mountain Dews, bottled water, and snacks.

Seems that there is something else troubling us. It may be that technology is outpacing our evolutionary adeptness. As a “near” Baby Boomer, I am distressed with passwords. The demand for them has become so ubiquitous and complex that I sometimes verge on the edge of despair. The ultimate, and sometimes most circuitous demands are those required to pay a bill online.

I can’t help but feel that if a someone wishes to hack into my account and pay my bill, what the hell?

So passwords exasperate me. But I don’t blame Joe Biden for them.

But wait. Suppose, just suppose, that I suffered a fall and woke with a penchant for watching Fox “news” ten hours a day on the television.

And suppose that for a majority of those ten hours, the pundits thereon preached an incessant stream of claims that Joe Biden was, in fact, the inventor and dictator of passwords.

Day after day the message lands. Joe Biden equals passwords. The word "password" sends me into an apoplectic frenzy like the character in the old "Niagra Falls" routine.

Would I then join The Cult?

Jeez, I hope not but the jury might offer a different opinion.

Oh, wait, can’t mention the word “jury.” That’s a current obsession on Fox.

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 TRIBAL INSTINCTS

We wonder what is happening to America. Civility as we once knew it has not only disappeared in politics, but it is now considered a weakness.

If one accepts the idea currently circulated among scientists and academics that evolutionary psychology is the main determinant of our actions, (and I know what a hard intellectual pill this is to swallow) the answer becomes clearer.

Some postulate that what we call a movement toward morality is not a spiritual movement, but rather a long process of socio-economic tradeoffs.

• We won’t raid your village if you don’t raid ours.
• I won’t try to kill you if you won’t try to kill me.
• We will trade goods with you for mutual gain.
• We will agree to use artificial objects, i.e., money for exchange instead of direct and laborious bartering.
• We will agree to live in peaceful harmony in cities to facilitate life’s needs and make life easier.
• Etc.

Accepting that, what we now see is simply a reversion to a more primitive, tribal state of evolution, spurred by fake news outlets and social media.

• Danger is everywhere.
• We must band together as a tribe for survival.
• The Tribe is the most sacred of all entities.
• We must destroy all who threaten the tribe.
• We must forget personal peace and pleasure to protect the tribe.
• We will develop a spiritual belief system to control large populations withing the tribe.
• Our leaders must offer strength, not goodness.

Kind of begins to make sense, doesn’t it?

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 FATHER'S DAY

Each year on this day I get the feeling that I must be the only person on Facebook that didn’t have a perfect father. Oh, mine wasn’t imperfect, his personal radar simply picked up a few blips from time to time. Those made him more interesting than sinister, except when it came to punishment for my myriad transgressions.

Perhaps his most salient characteristic was that he worked. My Sainted Mother emphasized it once when I mentioned a girl with whom I thought for sure I was in love. “Love,” she said. “Let me tell you about love. When I married your daddy, I wasn’t in love. I married him because we all knew the von Tungelns worked. And I knew I would never have to go hungry again. His family didn’t even go hungry during the depression. Then we sharecropped together, butchered hogs together, and bought this store together. After a while, I woke up one morning and realized I worshipped the ground he walked on.”

That thought echoed back to me not long ago when I asked my bride of over 50 years why she married me. “Good looks? Nice personality? Intelligence? Wit?”

“You had a J-O-B,” she said. “That’s important around here.”

It was important in our house. That little country grocery store was open six days a week from before daylight until late evening. In the slow part of the day, my daddy would butcher meat for the store, or cut wood to be sold to folks for heating their homes. During one long period he spent after hours adding two rooms to our house which, incidentally, was attached to the store.

A fond memory involves the annual four-day vacation the family took to the beaches at Florida or Texas. It was on one of those that I learned to read a map. Daddy showed me how. I considered it a minor miracle that one could follow those little lines and know what city was coming up next. I don’t guess the kids today will ever experience that miracle. Too bad.

I guess it was the reputation he and Sainted Mother bestowed on the family that I remember best. On a couple of occasions I managed to find myself under the questioning eye of a police officer who would have been delighted to arrest a careless teenager. Each time I was scolded and ordered home when I told them my name.

Things like that bring back memories as does a yellowed newspaper article I keep in a safe deposit box. It contains a piece written in our hometown newspaper after a deadly tornado tore through our area south of Pine Bluff in 1947. It tells how my father gave away things in our store to anyone who needed them after the damage, the righteousness bankrupting the little business. Another piece, a smaller one, reports how the little town of Lonsdale, Arkansas collected $45 and sent it to us after reading the first article. That would be almost $1,500 today.

So I don’t mind that he kept a cow for most of his life that he fed every night after the store closed or that he did so not for love of cattle but for love of the nightly nip of the Old Yellowstone he kept hidden in the hay.

Life’s radar needs a blip each day like Daddy needed that nip.